Various designs of field installable modular telephone connectors have been proposed. The desirable characteristics of a field installable telephone connector include a minimal size, maximal ease of manipulation of the wires into a termination position and maximal ease of assembly and termination of the connector.
A number of designs have proposed multipart connectors having a modular telephone jack or plug housing presenting a plurality of insulation displacement contacts for termination to individual conductors of a telephone cable. In the connector proposed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,261,633 pairs of wires are terminated in a plurality of barrel terminals by inserting the wires into each terminal with a special tool. In a similar connector, proposed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,508,411, wires are initially positioned in a slotted cover and then simultaneously terminated to a plurality of barrel terminals.
Other designs propose the use of a wire support or cover to initially position all of the wires to be terminated in open slots in the wire support. The wire support is then manipulated into engagement with a plurality of insulation displacement contacts projecting from the housing of the connector to terminate the wires to the connector. Reference may be had to U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,488,768 and 4,657,330.
Due to the size and close spacing of the adjacent wire positioning slots, manipulation of individual wires into the slots of the wire support of these proposed connectors and retention of the wires within the slots during manipulation of the wire support into engagement with the insulation displacement contacts of these connectors is difficult to reliably achieve.
Another plug connector utilizes a wire support having a plurality of cylindrical wire channels for positioning the wires prior to termination, each cylindrical wire channel having a diameter slightly greater than the diameter of the wire to allow close spacing of the wires to minimize the width of the connector. Each of the individual insulation displacement contact slots formed in the inner surface of the wire support communicate with a cylindrical wire channel. After insertion of the wires to be terminated into the cylindrical wire channels of the wire support, insulation displacement contacts positioned on the housing of the connector are aligned with the contact slots in the wire support and the wires are terminated by driving the wire support into the housing of the connector with a screw fastener. Manipulation of each wire through each respective small diameter cylindrical channel of the wire support can be difficult if the wires have any non-axial deformations. Also, the connector is difficult to assemble since the wire support must be screwed into engagement with the connector housing in order to overcome the high termination force of the connector.
The known field installable telephone connectors have not achieved the desirable characteristics of maximal ease of wire positioning, connector assembly and wire termination in a connector of minimal size and thus leave room for improvement in the art.